Champagne supernova: when the interests of Hollywood and science align

Nature Education Guest Writer

Philip Duffy, PhD
Post-doctoral Fellow, Strittmatter Lab
Yale University School of Medicine

Eternal youth is a much sought after treasure which has occupied the minds of mankind throughout the ages. It crops up frequently in myth and legend, and stories of artefacts such as the philosopher’s stone, elixir of life and universal panaceas are widespread in Eurasia and elsewhere. This theme may even have cropped up in organised religion; according to the account of the Pool of Bethesda in the Gospel of John, Jesus heals a man at the pool in Jerusalem. Today, Hollywood’s darlings spend millions of dollars each year on surgeries and fitness regimes designed to maintain that youthful look in front of the cameras.

It’s not surprising that the phenomenon of aging has come under investigation from scientists. Apart from a purely intellectual puzzle, the ‘science’ researching the preservation of youth is aggressively funded by the cosmetics industry each year. One large cosmetics company spent over 625 million dollars on R&D into cosmetics and dermatological research in 2007. They are not alone in pumping money into this area; a significant amount of money is provided from NIH grants to explore the mechanisms behind aging.

This investment has yielded several theories, such as free radicals originating in the diet that damage cellular organelles, to genetic ‘clocks’ called telomeres. These telomeres are long repetitive strands of DNA present at the ends of chromosomes, responsible for separating one chromosome from another in the DNA sequence and thus preventing genomic instability during cell division. These telomeres are thought to regulate how many times a cell can divide; telomeric sequences shorten each time the DNA replicates. Once a critical telomeric length is reached, the cell’s metabolic activity slows and it enters a stage of senescence, eventually resulting in death. This process occurring on the scale of a human body is believed to result in the aging process.

After identification of this potential mechanism of aging, it was found that the introduction of a catalytically active portion of the enzyme telomerase to aged cells suspended the aging process. This enzyme effectively rewound the cellular clock by stabilising telomere length. This is achieved by adding hexameric repeats onto the telomeric ends of the chromosomes, thus compensating for the erosion of telomeres that occurs in its absence. High telomerase activity exists in cells that divide frequently, such as germ cells, stem cells, epidermal skin cells, follicular hair cells, and cancer cells. Cancer researchers have been encouraged by recent evidence that telomerase activity is present in the vast majority of human tumors. A substantial portion of clinical cancer research is currently focused on anti-telomerase cancer therapeutics. If such drugs could lull cancer cells into senescence, they would stop dividing and pose less of a threat to the human organism.

In this respect, the interests of scientific researchers and the general population are aligned. With recent marketing campaigns asserting that 40 is the new 30 and plastic surgery becoming all too frequent, it appears that the market for turning back the clock on aging is as hungry as ever.